Re-conceptualizing Orders in the MENA Region

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RE-CONCEPTUALIZING ORDERS IN THE MENA REGION

THE ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE MENARA PROJECT

Edited by Eduard Soler i Lecha (coordinator),

Silvia Colombo, Lorenzo Kamel and Jordi Quero

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RE-CONCEPTUALIZING ORDERS IN THE MENA REGION THE ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE MENARA PROJECT

Edited by Eduard Soler i Lecha (coordinator), Silvia Colombo, Lorenzo Kamel and Jordi Quero ABSTRACT

The aim of this work is to set the conceptual architecture for the MENARA Project. It is articulated in five thematic sections. The first one traces back the major historical junctures in which key powers shaped the defining features of the present-day MENA region. Section 2 sets the geographical scope of the project, maps the distribution of power and defines regional order and its main features. Section 3 focuses on the domestic orders in a changing region by gauging and tracing the evolution of four trends, namely the erosion of state capacity; the securitization of regime policies; the militarization of contention; and the pluralization of collective identities. Section 4 links developments in the global order to their impact on the region in terms of power, ideas, norms and identities. The last section focuses on foresight studies and proposes a methodology to project trends and build scenarios. All sections, as well as the conclusion, formulate specific research questions that should help us understand the emerging geopolitical order in the MENA.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rasmus Alenius Boserup, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) Silvia Colombo, Senior Fellow, Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI)

Djallil Lounnas, Assistant Professor of International Studies, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane Edgar Göll, Co-head of Research of the cluster Future Studies and Participation, Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment (IZT)

Waleed Hazbun, Associate Professor of Political Science, American University of Beirut (AUB) Lorenzo Kamel, Senior Fellow, Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI)

Driss Maghraoui, Associate Professor of History and International Relations, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane

Karim Makdisi, Associate Professor of International Politics, American University of Beirut (AUB) Helle Malmvig, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)

Nizar Messari, Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane Pol Morillas, Research Fellow, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB)

Jordi Quero, Researcher, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) Erzsébet N. Rózsa, External Expert, Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade (IFAT)

Eduard Soler i Lecha, Senior Research Fellow, Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and scientific coordinator of the MENARA Project

Máté Szalai, Research Fellow, Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade (IFAT)

Tariq Tell, Assistant Professor of Political Science, American University of Beirut (AUB)

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INTRODUCTION

Lorenzo Kamel and Eduard Soler i Lecha

The states and societies of the Middle East and North Africa are the scenario of profound geopolitical shifts, prompting extraordinary levels of unpredictability and instability. The Arab uprisings in 2011 and, before that, the effects of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, have catalysed dynamics that will have a long-term impact over domestic, regional and global orders. Among others, this region is witnessing the growing importance of non-state actors, the proliferation of fragile states, the (re)emergence of sectarian politics and communal strife, unstable alliances and overlapping and somehow reinforcing regional cleavages, as well as the waning influence of the US and of Europe in this part of the world.

The Middle East and North Africa Regional Architecture: mapping geopolitical shifts, regional order and domestic transformations (MENARA) will contribute to a better understanding of those features and the geopolitical order in the making. MENARA is a three-year collaborative research project, bringing together 14 research centres from the EU, Turkey, the Maghreb, the Mashreq and the Gulf and financed by the European Commission. The acronym refers to the Arabic word menara, which means “lighthouse”. Like any lighthouse, the MENARA Project aims to shed light on what is in front of us but which may be difficult to see, helping us to anticipate what is to come and guiding us along challenging pathways. A lighthouse also evokes the sea, in our case the Mediterranean Sea, and thus a reminder that the EU is deeply connected to this region. All these messages are further encapsulated in the logo of the project, inspired by the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a milestone in human history that for centuries aided navigation between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

To put it in a nutshell, MENARA will provide answers to whether the Middle East and North Africa will be composed of more conflict-ridden or more cohesive societies, whether this is becoming a more fragmented or a more integrated region and how peripheral or how embedded this region and its components are in global dynamics. All this can be summarized in an overarching research question: will the geopolitical future of this region be marked by either centrifugal or centripetal dynamics or by a combination of both?

To do so, a first step is to conceptualize the notions of “order” and “region” in view of the geopolitical shifts under way in this part of the world. The project will describe the main features of the regional geopolitical order (norms, values, institutions and actors) in place before 2011, its origins and evolution and then the extent to which all the ongoing changes have modified, or have the potential to modify, the traditional normative and structural features of the regional geopolitical order. This concept paper is a critical step in that respect.

The aim of the paper is to help our research team in identifying and mapping the domestic, regional and global dynamics and trends that shape the regional order. These include ideational factors (identities, ideas and values – comprising, among others: political ideology, religion, culture, gender relations and trans-boundary solidarity) as well as material ones (power and interdependence,

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including flows of goods, capital, energy and people). We will not only look at dynamics but also at the key actors. Thus, MENARA will pinpoint who is who amid these geopolitical shifts and will assess the objectives and capabilities of both well-established and (re)emerging actors, paying specific attention to interdependence relations, fault lines and conflicts between them.

This information is needed to build future scenarios for mid-term (2025) and long-term (2050) timeframes. Once the complexity of the ongoing changes is decoded, the project will offer a research-based, thorough assessment of the region’s future, identifying the key actors who may be able to shift ongoing dynamics and under what circumstances. This will include discerning who among them is willing to consolidate the current order, who will advocate for a change of its features and who will question the order outright. All this will help us inform EU policies and strategies through policy-relevant analysis and the production of targeted policy recommendations.

As expected from a Horizon2020 project, this is a complex and ambitious endeavour. MENARA combines explanatory, prospective and prescriptive dimensions. It also analyses ongoing dynamics at three different levels (domestic, regional and global). The project offers not only interdisciplinary expertise (bringing together political scientists, sociologists, economists, geographers, historians, area experts and international relations scholars) but also a cross-temporal approach to our subject of study. It combines a grasp of the past, an understanding of present dynamics, and imagines possible futures for the region.

The scope and structure of this concept paper reflects this pluralistic approach to the emerging regional order in the Middle East and North Africa. The contributions to this edited volume are a first but critical step in fulfilling our goals, in providing a clearer picture of the scope and ambition of the project and in proposing a shared conceptual guide to collectively analyse a moving target. The concept paper is articulated in five thematic sections all connected to a central thread: the driving forces behind the regional order in the making, and the implications of these transformations in and outside the region.

Despite its primary focus on a relatively distant past, the historical section (no. 1) speaks to and sheds light on the present. In doing so, it traces back the major historical junctures in which key powers shaped the defining features of the present-day MENA, and shows how these dynamics resulted in a process of “simplification”. The process of simplification is about the tendency to define, indeed rationalise, the other in terms more suitable, comprehensible and useful to the self.

In line with this, the historical section, largely focuses also on dynamics from within the region, shows how a number of key ideas and concepts have been understood, imposed and/or adopted in different cultural and geographical contexts, and explains why “the burden of history” matters in understanding the present and the future of the regional (section 2), domestic (section 3) and global (section 4) dimensions.

Section 2 provides a conceptual bridge that connects the past to the contemporary regional order and sets the ground for a comprehensive definition and understanding of the term region and the agency within. This section frames a number of geographical and theoretical key-concepts adopted in MENARA, defines a geographical scope that fully includes non-Arab regional players, maps the distribution of novel poles of power, and defines international order as a formal or informal

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arrangement that sustains rule-governed interactions among different units within a system in their pursuit of individual and collective goals. This section also elaborates on changing amity/

enmity patterns, how transnational actors are challenging the regional order and the implications for conflict duration and intensity.

Section 3 focuses on the domestic orders in a changing Middle East and North Africa. It unpacks the concept of domestic orders by gauging and tracing the evolution of their constitutive dynamics since 2011: erosion of state capacity; securitization of regime policies; militarization of contention;

and pluralization of collective identities. The conclusions rely on three pillars of interrogation: an empirical description and analysis of each of the above-mentioned trends; a theoretical modelling of the interrelation between the four above-mentioned factors in the formation and transformation of domestic orders; finally, an analysis of the interrelation between the making of domestic orders and the making of the regional order in the MENA.

Section 4 completes the three-dimensional perspective through a conceptual framework linking developments in the global order with their impact on the MENA. Taking advantage of a number of theoretical developments in International Relations, the analysis of global order elucidates the effects over the region of changes in the global distribution of power, ideas, norms and identities.

This section connects with the existing literature on whether this region is a penetrated system and on the level of autonomy of its main actors.

Each of the four outlined sections look towards the future, placing particular emphasis on how the past and the present will affect the region’s dynamics and generations, and, through the region, the global perspective. In this respect, the last (fifth) section focuses on foresight studies, representing a sort of analytical umbrella of the project, in as much it aims to find a “reduction of complexity” of all themes and ideas analysed by MENARA. In order to maximize this, and to detect the major ongoing trends in foresight studies, the authors collected and analysed a total of 40 such studies conducted by international experts and institutions. It emerges that most of these focus on climate change, migration and energy issues, with only very few concentrating explicitly on political, economic and societal issues. This is a scientific gap that MENARA is striving to fill through the analysis of the structures, dynamics, challenges and potential of all the relevant actors in and outside the region. Focusing on their agency can indeed be a powerful tool to “de- simplify” the reading of what the region is experiencing, to reshape the paradigmatic schemes through which to look at this part of the world, and to realize Eric Hobsbawm’s wish to rescue not only what is often perceived as “the stockinger and the peasant [i.e. the region], but also the nobleman and the king” (Hobsbawm 1997:184-85).

REFERENCES

Hobsbawm, Eric (1997), On History, New York, New Press

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1. THE PAST:

TERMINOLOGY, CONCEPTS AND HISTORICAL JUNCTURES

Lorenzo Kamel, Karim Makdisi, Waleed Hazbun and Tariq Tell

¹

All history is contemporary history Benedetto Croce In the early 19th century, when the Ottoman authorities increasingly lost their grip on power, a large part of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean experienced the end of an old order and the rise of new powers and long-lasting dynasties (Osman 2014).² Today, many of the countries in the region are witnessing a similar process, and old and new powers are struggling for supremacy, potentially triggering new and transformative conditions. The current historical conjuncture has been interpreted as “the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds” (Hubbard et al. 2014; see also Kaplan 2015), but it would be perhaps more accurate to refer to it as the fulfilment of a prediction by Janet Abu-Lughod in 1989, namely that the era of European/Western hegemony would probably be superseded by “a return to the relative balance of multiple centers exhibited in the thirteenth- century world system” (Abu-Lughod 1989:371).

While it might be too early to assess to what extent Abu-Lughod’s predictions hold true, any attempt to imagine the region’s future must start from an analysis of its past and the key turning points and concepts that shaped this order. To do so, the first part of this section contextualizes a number of concepts commonly adopted for approaching and understanding the region. It shows how different ideas and assumptions have been understood, imposed and/or adopted in different cultural and geographical contexts. The second part, by contrast, traces the major historical junctures in which key powers shaped the defining features of the present-day MENA region. The conclusions touch on why history matters and suggest three research questions that will inform the remainder of the MENARA Project.

1.1 DECONSTRUCTING CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY

Providing a historical framework can be a powerful tool for deconstructing a number of terms and concepts generally adopted in discussing the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Concepts such as state, capital, border, citizenship, private property, sectarianism (or Tā’ifīya, a neologism introduced in Arabic in the 19th century), which will also be widely used in the course of the MENARA

1 Lorenzo Kamel wrote the section on terminology, concepts and historical junctures up to the interwar period (from page 7 to 16). Karim Makdisi, Waleed Hazbun and Tariq Tell wrote the section from the interwar period to the present (from page 16 to 23). The authors would like to thank Djallil Lounnas, Nizar Messari, Driss Maghroui and Douaa Zazouli for a number of insights and inputs on North Africa, and Eduard Soler i Lecha for several useful comments.

2 Nader Kadhim (2013) argued that the Arab Spring is the result of three waves of unfulfilled hopes. The first of the three, he contends, dates back to the early 19th century, when Arab intellectuals were persuaded that the region did not

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Project, held a secondary meaning in pre-First World War MENA and were largely irrelevant until protestant missionaries and others first contributed to disseminating these and other ideas in the region.³ Their limited adoption was confirmed by the absence of Arabic terms to express those same concepts.

The common claim that Jerusalem has never served as the capital (from the Latin caput, head) of any Arab or Muslim entity, for instance, neglects the fact that the notion of ´āṣima itself, which in modern Arabic refers to the capital of a state,⁴ was unknown in classical Arabic, at least in its contemporary political-administrative meaning. This is even truer for citizenship, the concept that commonly indicates political belonging in the West and recalls the Greek polites (citizen) and Latin cives. Until a relatively recent past, Semitic idioms offered no word to indicate such concepts. If in modern Arabic, in order to fill up this void, the term jinsīya has been adopted (from the root j-n-s, which in classical Arabic indicated gender, race and class, depending on the case), this may be linked to the need to introduce an idea that would help outsiders to interpret the locals.

This does not imply that in the Middle East notions for expressing one’s own identity were non- existent, or that the particular importance of a certain city was not recognized (not only Baghdad or Damascus, but also Jerusalem, in the first period of Islam, played a role comparable with that of a “capital”) (see ´Athâmina 2000). Concepts such as ´aṣabīya (reciprocal solidarity),⁵ developed by Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406) and based primarily on blood ties (the ṣilat al-raḥīm), qawmīya, which may be interpreted as loyalty to a community held together through cultural and linguistic bonds, and watanīya, that is loyalty to a community residing in a particular region, demonstrate a linguistic and cultural articulation that is worth noting. None of these, however, represented the priority of expressing one’s political being. None of them carried meanings comparable to those which, especially in Europe and the USA, were relevant identity elements.

The absence of such terms was also the mirror of a fluid reality in which self-versus-other constructions were less expressed or needed. The relatively recent introduction in the region of concepts such as refugee, smuggler, contraband or the minority/majority dichotomy, so fraught with meaning today, are very much the result of newly created mental and physical divisions. As noted by Benjamin White (2011:209), “the nation-state form creates the objective conditions in which people begin to consider themselves as minorities and majorities: however these remain subjective categories.”⁶ The “millet system,” today often misrepresented as a static and rigid top-

3 The Syrian Protestant University of Beirut, founded by American missionaries in 1866 and later known as the American University of Beirut, played a meaningful role in this process.

4 Al-´āṣima (singular form of al-´āwāṣim, defences, fortifications), literally “the protector,” indicated originally the line between southern Turkey, Iraq and northern Syria, which divided the Byzantine Empire from the caliphates.

5 The concept of ´aṣabīya was introduced by Ibn Khaldūn in the Muqaddima. It may be linked to what Said Nursî (1878- 1960) defined as “positive nationalism,” a predisposition that “arises from an inner need of social life and is the cause of mutual assistance and solidarity; it ensures a beneficial strength” (Nursî 1993:381). ´Aṣabīya is not, then, a concept comparable to nationalism. Baron De Slane (1801-78) translated it as “esprit de corps,” while Hellmut Ritter (1892- 1971) interpreted it with a more convincing “solidarity feeling.”

6 As noted by White (2011:45), “The communities that emerged as ‘minorities’ during the mandate cannot simply be mapped back onto the millets or Christian and Jewish communities of the Ottoman period. A minority is a modern

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down structure implemented for organizing the life of “Ottoman minorities,” was in reality hardly a “system,”⁷ and had indeed very little in common with the “process of minorization” started in the late 19th century. As noted by Aron Rodrigue (1996), “nothing in the political system of the Ottoman Empire called for different groups to merge into one […] That particular arrangement, therefore, renders invalid all our terms for debate about minority/majority, which are all extraordinarily Europe-centered.” Indeed, before the first decades of the 20th century, neither the local populations nor the Western powers used the term “minority,”⁸ or “majority,” to describe the ethno-religious composition of the region.⁹

This also applies to the concept of nationalism, whose largely disruptive influence reached the Eastern Mediterranean at a relatively late stage in comparison to the North African context.

Countries such as Egypt and Tunisia in fact had been nearly independent political units since the 19th century. In this respect the “colonial” division of North Africa has been tendentially the result of a less “alienating” and disruptive process than that occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In a number of primary sources produced by peoples in the region in the 18th and 19th centuries it is possible to detect a distinction between ibn ´Arab (Arab son) and ibn Turk (Turkish son). This means that the local populations often considered the non-Arabic-speaking Turks as foreigners.

At the same time, the origin from a certain village, the hamūla (clan) of belonging and the local customs were all factors which marked a certain distinction between the proto-nations present in the region. And yet external dangers, which are very often the basis of the need of a people to define itself in a clear-cut way, were largely secondary until the growing Western encroachment on the region.

This is even more pertinent given that the idea individuals could assemble and be organized in accordance with non-religious criteria was largely perceived as inherently opposed to the Islamic concept of community. The influential Iranian-born philosopher Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī contended, for instance, that Islam provided a far superior means of socio-political organization. Such claims

relationship to the state and the wider society alter significantly as they became minorities in the new Syrian nation- state.” It should be added that the so-called “millet system” was neither unitary, nor static. In Latif Tas’s words: “It was also not a ‘system’, which implies something structured to come top-down from the centre as part of a representation of authority, but rather something that emerged bottom-up in different ways from the various communities” (Tas 2014:498).

7 The “millet practice” (“system” implies a top-down structure from the centre as part of a representation of authority) emerged as a bottom-up process from the various communities, representing their ways of life. This practice, often highly localized and unevenly applied, registered a process of institutionalization and centralization in the second half of the 19th century. Laura Robson (2016:3) noted that “the idea of minorities (and, for that matter, majorities) arose outside the Middle East, in a post-Enlightenment Europe,” while Aron Rodrigue (1996) reminded us that “it is fundamentally wrong to conceptualize the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East more generally, before the modern period in terms of majorities and minorities.” For a comprehensive deconstruction of the assumption that a millet was equal or similar to a “minority” see Peter Sluglett (2016).

8 According to Peter Sluglett (2016:37), “the main difference between a millet and a ‘religious minority’ in the Arab world is that the first is a feature of the multiethnic Ottoman state that disappeared after the First World War, and the second is an often problematic component of the modern national state.”

9 Stephen Hemsley Longrigg (1893-1979) pointed out that “the oft-drawn picture of Syria as a ‘mosaic of minorities’

can be misleading, and this is not only by ignoring the immense preponderance of the Sunni Muslim population, but also by unduly emphasizing the elements which separated this majority from the rest, and minimizing the wide common

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were echoed by many other thinkers and followers of Al-Afghānī, including the Egyptian jurist Muḥammad ´Abduh, one of the key funding figures of Islamic modernism and a direct witness of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

Religion proved to be a useful tool for Western powers in their attempts to pre-empt the formation of multi-religious nationalist movements. In the British Raj, for instance, London helped to construct a new version of the caste system, assigning social and political meanings to caste and enshrining these meanings in legal and political structures. The promotion of Muslim communal identity was considered by London as a powerful tool to appease Muslim opinion throughout the empire,¹⁰ thus as a way of preventing the emergence of a pan-Islamic rebellion – in Malaysia, India and later in Egypt and Palestine – against the British authority. Muslim communal institutions were thus used, particularly in the Middle East, to confine Muslim political expression to religious issues (Robson 2011).¹¹

The successful attempts of pre-empting the formation of indigenous multi-religious nationalist movements did not necessarily imply a will to divide the region by ethnicity into sub-autonomous areas. For a long time, the British authorities in fact tried to avert any possible territorial partition:

they did not have any interest in sharing frontiers with powers with large armies. The British approach aimed to create friendly buffer states by means of influence, exercised through trade treaties, loans and friendly advice. The situation began to change with Germany’s increasing influence, and the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894, the Fashoda Crisis (1898) and the British military frailty that was displayed during the Boer War (1899-1902). From then, and more precisely beginning with the agreement (“Entente Cordiale”) that in 1904 granted freedom of action to Britain in Egypt in exchange of a free hand accorded to Paris in Morocco, the phenomenon of partitions among the major powers became increasingly common.

1.2 ORDERS AND BORDERS: IMPERIAL LEGACIES

While the first part of this section has aimed to deconstruct and contextualize a number of concepts and terms, this part turns to the current geopolitical order, and more precisely to the major historical turning points and the role of key powers in it, which helped to shape the region as we know it today.

GEOPOLITICAL DYNAMICS

In his book A History of the Arab Peoples, Albert Hourani chose the first major conquest of an Arab- speaking country, Algeria, by France (1830-47) as the first key turning point of his analysis of the

10 Britain understood the Middle East as tendentially fragmented in religions and confessions. In the African context, on the contrary, Western powers perceived ethnicity as the primary category of social and political divisions among their colonial subjects. These approaches had a strong influence in shaping the ways in which the two contexts developed in later times.

11 These kinds of “communal political” institutions and identities found a particularly successful expression under the authority of the Consul-General of Egypt, Lord Cromer (1841-1917), who promoted religious affiliation as a political category in the colonial context of Egypt. The tendency of seeing political implications in ethnic, religious and cultural

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“age of European empires.” From then on, Hourani contended, Muslim states and societies could no longer live in a self-sufficient system of inherited culture: “Their need was now to generate the strength to survive in a world dominated by others” (Hourani 1991:263). The historical context that paved the way for this epochal outcome was nonetheless rooted in earlier imperial dynamics, that had in Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798) – the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East – its most celebrated example.

Napoleon, like most of the major statesmen of his time, aimed to take advantage of the growing instability of the Ottoman Empire, whose initial regression has been traced back to a number of causes, including the abolition of the Timar,¹² and the outcomes of cold and drought during the Little Ice Age, when the rising population pressure and resource shortages created the conditions for the outbreak of the Celali Rebellion (1595-1610): a turning point in Ottoman fortunes, particularly in its agriculture and economy (Fagan 2000).

Since then, the Empire had gradually transformed itself into a sort of land of conquest for the increasingly aggressive European powers: “This is an odd Country,” observed John Bidwell in 1809 from Istanbul, “where every foreign minister enjoys, from the Porte, absolute power over the Subjects of this Sovereign [...] His house is a sanctuary, the violation of which by the Turks would instantly produce a war between the two Countries.”¹³

It was not Napoleon’s incursion, however, but the rivalry with Russia, exacerbated in the last decade of the 18th century, that prompted the final arbiter of the region’s fate before the First World War – Britain – to intervene more directly in the Eastern Mediterranean. The presence of a powerful Ottoman state was considered by Tsarist Russia as an obstacle for accessing Black Sea and Mediterranean water ports. Britain, on the other hand, perceived Tsarist policies in the Balkans and Asia as a threat to its trade routes to the Far East and took it as a priority to preserve the territorial integrity of the “sick man of Europe.” As for France, it supported the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and aimed to establish an independent Arab state in the area, under its direct influence, that could hinder British trade routes to India. The latter was indeed the cornerstone of Britain’s imperial strategies toward the region, and owing to geopolitics, history and its unique status within the Empire had a decisive influence on a chain of overseas agencies that stretched from southern Persia to eastern Africa.

A NEW ORDER IN THE MAKING

The Crimean War (1853-6) played a particularly influential role in shaping the features of the geopolitical order that concerned large parts of the MENA up until the First World War. It forced Ottomans to fall into debt with European powers, pushed the region into the world economy,¹⁴ and

12 The Timar system, almost abandoned in the 17th century and formally abolished in 1831, foresaw that the conquered territories be distributed among the participants of the military campaigns in the form of temporary rights over the land.

See Lewis (1958).

13 British Library and Manuscript Collection (BLMC) - EP - v. IV - Add. 41315. John Bidwell to “Miss Sally”. Istanbul, 28 Sep. 1809.

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served as a watershed in the history of several Mediterranean countries. It can be associated with the first proto-democratic reforms to be introduced in some countries with Muslim majorities (in 1861 the bey of Tunis introduced for the first time in the Islamic world a written constitution;

five years later the first elections were held in Egypt; in 1876 the first Ottoman constitution was enacted) (Kamel 2015).

On top of this, it was the first war in which Ottoman and European soldiers fought side by side against a common enemy; for the first time, in fact, a Protestant power (Britain) sided with a Muslim empire (Ottoman) in fighting a Christian empire (Russia). Furthermore, it represented the first major armed clash in which news from the fronts was communicated by telegraph and printed in newspapers almost in real time: a novelty that, thanks also to the first photographs taken on the battlefields, gave an unprecedented echo to the victories of the Western powers against the despotic Russian Empire. In the more limited context of Palestine, the Crimean War constituted a no less relevant turning point. It was from that moment on that the idea of a “Jewish client state” in Palestine became increasingly established;¹⁵ a client state that was “vital to British colonial interests, particularly [to] India” (Levine 2003:48).

The year that marked the beginning of the Crimean War was particularly meaningful for the Persian Gulf: the local Arab sheikhdoms signed the Perpetual Maritime Truce, recognizing Britain as the dominant power in the Gulf (oil in the Persian Gulf was discovered in 1908 and acquired a central role for Western powers in the 1930s, when major finds were made). The year that ended the conflict, on the other hand, coincided with the second reformist phase, inaugurated by the Hatt-ı Hümayun in 1856, when the Ottoman authorities, under the direct influence of the two powers that had fought alongside the Porte during the Crimean War (Britain and France), introduced the concept of patriotism or compatriotism, as a link between the subjects of the Empire: a decisive step towards the secular, Western concept of nationality.¹⁶

Just a few months after the conclusion of the Crimean War, a second major turning point occurred.

The outbreak of the Indian Revolt against the rule of the British East India Company pushed London to reorganize its naval communications to India. The opening of the Suez Canal by France on 17 November 1869 significantly increased the international importance of the land bordering the naval corridor between India and Europe. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli – who secured a large percentage of the Suez Canal’s shares in 1876 – signed an epochal agreement with Istanbul in which, in exchange for control over Cyprus, London pledged to guarantee protection to the

“territories in Asia of His Imperial Majesty the Sultan” (House of Commons 1878:ii).

Moreover, a number of innovations introduced in this historical period went to accelerate processes that were already ongoing and did not succeed to alter the rhythms of life of most of the local populations (particularly in rural areas).

Yet, in the medium and long term the penetration of Western ideas and practices went to shatter a number of well- established equilibria.

15 Clayton (1986:138) defined it as a “key link (and a buffer against the French) in the Middle Eastern chain.”

16 The failure of the reform process exacerbated the sense of alienation of “minorities” in the Empire and drove local

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The agreement, signed on 4 June 1878, followed four years later by London’s occupation of Egypt and Sudan, the two areas that together with Palestine represented the strategic banks of the Suez Canal, marked the historic phase in which London realized that, if needed, the region was worth fighting a war for. More specifically, the entry of Cyprus into London’s sphere of influence marked the moment at which Disraeli felt that sooner or later “the step would bring Palestine and Syria within the orbit of British control” (Storrs 1940:49).

The purchasing of the Suez Canal – 80 per cent of the traffic in the Canal occurred on British boats – ushered in “a quarter-century of imperial expansion unequalled since the conquests of Alexander the Great” (Tuchman 1956:161). During this period (“New Imperialism”), between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Afghanistan, Burma, the Transvaal, Egypt and a number of other strategic regions fell under British influence, and Germany replaced Russia as London’s main imperial rival.

The German Reich, shaped during the long years of Otto von Bismarck’s ascendancy, existed from the unification of Germany (1871) until the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1918). It appeared to Sultan Abdul-Hamid II (1842-1918) as a potentially less dangerous ally than Britain, whose ambitions, even more so after the Cyprus Convention and the occupation of Egypt, alerted the Turkish authorities. Berlin, on the other hand, had no historical precedent in the region and the prestige of the Second Reich was clearly on the rise, as the Berlin Congress of 1878 confirmed.

These and other factors led the Porte to choose what would later turn out to be the wrong horse:

the Ottoman and German empires collapsed one after the other against the backdrop of the disastrous effects of the First World War.

The years that preceded the “Great War” witnessed a revival of nationalism, and this had direct repercussions also on Persia – where the Constitutional Revolution ignited in 1905 sought to oppose the encroachment of imperial powers and, at the same time, replace arbitrary power with representative government and social justice – and the Ottoman Empire, which witnessed a few epoch-making episodes destined to shape the region’s future. In this respect one of the major turning points can be detected in 1908, when the Young Turks seized power and implemented their “Turkification” and centralization policies. When Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean felt alienated by Istanbul’s new policies, they embraced the nationalist discourse their Christian counterparts had been championing for some time.

In this same period, London and Paris increasingly defined local realities and dissent as expressions of primitive religious cleavages and placed their newly crafted communal institutions (for instance the Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine) as modern systems above the “medieval fray” (Robson 2011:54). These kinds of “communal political identities,” largely inspired by the approach adopted by the Consul-General of Egypt, Lord Cromer (1841-1917), promoted religious affiliation as a political category. Communal and judicial structures envisioned and implemented in the first part of the last century, in other words, succeeded in legally enshrining religious differences: one of the most consequential and long-lasting outcomes of the Sykes-Picot Zeitgeist, not of the 1915-16 agreement (never implemented) that bears their names.

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A NORTH-AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE

The French and Spanish colonization of North Africa had a long-lasting impact on state formation and borders, which, in turn, affected the regional post-independences era. Indeed, the French colonization of Algeria, its subsequent annexation of the country as a French département and the imposition of the French administrative model, in the context of an extremely violent colonization, led to the destruction of all the indigenous administrative apparatus and to that of all the traditional elites, without being replaced by new ones. Indeed, revolts such as those led by Emir Abdelkader (1832-47), Lalla Fatma Nssoumer and Boubeghla (1850-7), and the 1870-1 general uprising, were conducted by traditional leaders.

On the other hand, Morocco and Tunisia remained as existing political units with important traditional centres of power (sultan in Morocco and bey in Tunisia), the survival of important traditional centres of authority such as the ulemas and the emergence of an important educated bourgeoisie led to a somewhat less conflictual, yet violent, process of decolonization.

This era also played a major role in terms of setting the borders and on the subsequent post independence conflicts. Indeed, during the pre-French colonization and the Ottoman ruling, the borders between Tunisia, Algeria and Libya did not exist per se, since they were all part of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, regarding the Ottoman-Moroccan territorial delimitation, it essentially existed only in the north, and to that extent the border was the city of Oujda; the major problem came from the French and Spanish conquest of the Sahara. Before the colonial era, there were no definite borders. In such a situation, the ruling patterns were based on “tribal allegiance”:

the Sultan of Morocco received the allegiance of tribes coming from various parts of the Sahara regions. Yet the French and Spanish colonization resulted in the establishment of clear formal borders regardless of any historical local pre-existing factors and without any consultation with the local populations, which finally led to major sources of unrest. Regarding the setting of the Algerian-Libyan-Tunisian borders, it did not eventually led to major tensions. In Western North Africa, on the other hand, it led to major sources of tensions and conflicts between Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania.

On the basis of the situation prevailing before the French and Spanish colonizations, Morocco claimed sovereignty over Mauritania as well as over Spanish Sahara, which led, until today, to the Western Sahara conflict and to the territorial claims over the cities of Bechar and Tinduf which are today parts of Algeria.

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE MANDATES SYSTEM

The First World War claimed a total of 9 million soldiers and around 7 million civilians. Many, while the war was still ongoing, began to explore which new tools could be developed to prevent such disasters from happening again. The decision to establish a League of Nations was rooted in previous times, but became official during the peace conferences that followed the war. This organization, precursor of the United Nations (UN), played a meaningful role in shaping the region,

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and its charter is still today used to foster some political and territorial claims.¹⁷

Three distinct categories of Mandate were envisioned in the League of Nations’ Charter (class A, B, C), depending on how much the population under examination was believed to be “able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” (Art. 22). The official purpose of these Mandates was to prepare the various populations for self-determination and self-government. In practical terms, however, the victorious powers used it to legitimize their own

“rights of conquest” in order to divide the spoils of former empires, or of areas belonging to the defeated nations. This aim was pursued through a paternalistic approach that, on the one hand, supported the idea that there was a hierarchy among “races” and, on the other, put an exaggerated emphasis on the need to establish well-defined borders based on ethnic principles. In other words, the Mandate system represented, in Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni and Shlomo Ben Ami’s words (2009:16), “a new form of colonialism that had the appearance of international legitimacy.”

Such an appearance of legitimacy was perceived by many as precarious, not least in consideration of the fact that in the peace conferences that followed the First World War the opinions of almost any representatives of the peoples subject to the Mandates were not taken into consideration (Kamel 2015:ch.7). Nonetheless, Efraim Karsh and a number of other scholars have stressed the importance of abandoning “the self-righteous victimization paradigm that has informed Western scholarship for so long,” contending that, for instance, Iraq was established “on behalf of Emir Faisal of Mecca and at his instigation, while Jordan was established to satisfy the ambitions of Faisal’s older brother Abdullah” (Karsh 2015). In his opinion, many of the states in the region “were established pretty much as a result of local exertions” (Karsh 2015).

Overlooking or downplaying the agency of the colonized is indeed problematic. Their efforts to shape a different course must be highlighted, and the same applies to the disappointment that local representatives expressed when these efforts were unsuccessful.¹⁸ Writing about the current struggles for self-assertion by the many peoples of the Pacific, Arif Dirlik (1998:6) pointed out that “there is in these efforts not a negation of the history of colonialism and conquest, but its remembrance in rewriting history in keeping with Pacific people’s historical experiences.” His words apply in the best possible way also to the present, and most likely to the future, of the MENA, and this is why “thinking postcolonially” (Bilgin 2016)¹⁹ is in many respects a way of getting the region back into history (Kamel 2012).

17 This applies to plenty of conflictual areas in the region, and particularly to the Israeli-Palestinian context. International lawyer Eugene Kontorovich, for instance, pointed out (erroneously) that “up to 1948 all this area [present-day Israel and the Palestinian territories] was Palestine reserved as a Jewish State by the League of Nations Mandate […] the legality of the Mandate jurisprudence cannot be changed.” Eugene Kontorovich, The Legal Case for Israel, lecture given at the seventh annual National Jewish Retreat, Fort Lauderdale, 2 August 2012 (video), http://www.torahcafe.com/jewishvideo.

php?vid=33fb484b5.

18 “The present administration of Palestine,” lamented for instance the representatives of the Palestine Arab Delegation in a letter to British public opinion in 1930, “is appointed by His Majesty’s Government and governs the country through an autocratic system in which the population has no say.” Israel State Archives (ISA) – RG65 1054/1-P. Protest signed by the Palestine Arab Delegation, 19 May 1930.

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Yet to portray the region after the First World War as largely the result of local exertions, and to choose Emir Faisal as a symbol of this, is ahistorical. Faysal, chosen as King of Iraq by the British authorities in August 1921, had never set foot in Mesopotamia before that moment, spoke a different dialect from the local Arabs and was a Sunni in a Shia-majority country. It is true that some of the most persistent advocates of Faysal’s kingship were the Shia tribes of the mid-Euphrates region who were in full-scale rebellion in 1920, but the fact remains that a “large proportion” of Faysal’s subjects “did not recognize his authority” and that the new king politicized “sectarianism to obfuscate the state’s failures” (Al-Ali 2014:19, 21). Particularly meaningful is that Faysal was chosen by London to officially represent the Palestinian Arabs in the post-First World War peace conferences, despite the fact that, as Chaim Weizman witnessed, he (Faysal) was “contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn’t even regard as Arabs.”²⁰

THE INTERWAR PERIOD

Despite much Wilsonian rhetoric about national self-determination, the territorial pretensions of the “Arab Movement” that coalesced under Hashemite leadership after the launching of the Great Arab Revolt in July 1916, and the claims of nationalist elites in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent to represent the region’s peoples were largely ignored during the diplomatic machinations that followed the First World War (see Kamel 2015: ch. 7). The result was that the Mandates over Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq that emerged from the Anglo-French agreements at St Remo (1920) and Lausanne (1923) lacked even a modicum of nationalist legitimacy. This combined with the social dislocation and dearth bequeathed by wartime exactions to spark anti- colonial uprisings in Egypt in 1919 (Goldberg 1992, Kazemi and Waterbury 1991: ch. 9); in Iraq in 1920 (Vinogradov 1972, MacFie 1999) and in Syria in 1921-2 and 1925-7 (Provence 2005). The cost of suppressing these uprisings, combined with the menace of the Wahhabi Ikhwan along the Arabian frontiers of Britain’s “undeclared empire” in the Arab East (Darwin 1999), served to harden imperial strategists’ commitment to indirect rule. Therefore, as Britain’s “moment” in the Middle East dawned at the Cairo Conference of 1921, imperial overstretch tipped the balance in favour of T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill’s “Sharifian Solution” rather than the more direct model of control advocated by Sir Percy Cox, Arnold Wilson and the other “Indians” in Mesopotamia (Paris 2003).

In Syria and Lebanon, popular hostility to colonial rule outside Mount Lebanon obliged the French to attempt a similar approach. Even after their military hold on Syria had been secured with the final defeat of the Great Syrian Revolt in the summer of 1927, the colonial authorities in Beirut were forced to pursue different constitutional power-sharing formulas in order to broker a reconciliation with the notables of the National Bloc (Neep 2012, Khoury 1987). Meanwhile, the Palestinian national movement’s struggle against the settler colonialism of Zionism during the British Mandate period was lost following successive British interventions that culminated in the great uprisings of 1936-9. Palestinian leaders were exiled and their proto-institutions weakened or dismantled.

20 Excerpt from a letter written by Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) to his wife on 17 July 1918, a few days after the private

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For colonial administrators still concerned with order rather than progress, the legacy of fifty years of late Ottoman centralization recommended the legal and administrative legacy of the Tanzimat as the most appropriate instrument for colonial governance.²¹ The modernist cast of Mandatory rule that resulted in restricted tribal trusteeship – a key element in indirect rule in British Africa and in Morocco under Lyautey – to isolated pockets such as the Desert Area in Trans- Jordan or the Controlle Bedouin in Syria. Instead of decentralized despotisms under favoured chiefs, communitarian colonialism in the Fertile Crescent took the form of a politics of minorities (as exemplified in Britain’s maintenance of Sunni dominance in Iraq and in her facilitation of Zionist colonization in Palestine; but also apparent in French favouritism towards the Maronites in Lebanon or her dalliance with Alawite and Druse entities in Syria in the 1920s) aimed at facilitating Western control by means of a policy of divide et impera.

These forms of colonial communalism in practice preserved anti-statist ethnic, tribal and sectarian assabiyyahs in more toxic forms than those that resulted from the “ideology of tribalism” in Africa.

Coupled to the eccentricities of Mandatory map making (a “Greater” Lebanon that annexed the Muslim Biqaa and Jabal ´Amil; a Kurdish majority Mosul in an Arabizing Iraq; France’s ceding of partly Alawite Iskanderun to Turkey in 1939; the partitions of Palestine in 1937 and 1947-8), and the “ethnic security maps” (Enloe 1980: ch. 1-2) of colonial security forces, the legacy of Mandatory minority policy would be overextended sectarian authoritarianisms even more inimical to democratic state-building than the “de-centralized despotisms” of Sub-Saharan Africa (White 2011).²²

Throughout the interwar Arab east, the mechanics of indirect rule under League of Nations auspices forced the new Mandatory powers to invest in a spectrum of collaborators thrown up by late Ottoman reform,²³ an urban notability transformed by the 1858 Ottoman land code into a class of rural magnates, the Sharifian elite that gathered around Faysal in Baghdad and the imported administrative elite foisted upon his brother Abdullah in Amman. To these beneficiaries of British power could be added a bevy of allied Arabian rulers bound by Trucial agreement to the “Empire of the Raj” since the early 19th century (Onley 2004, 2005).

THE SECOND WORLD WAR, OIL, AND THE DECLINE OF EUROPEAN HEGEMONY

With the colonial carve up of the Arab east, Ibn Saud emerged as the most powerful of this constellation of Arabian sultans. Between 1902 and 1932 he successfully deployed Wahhabi zeal and long-standing connections with Great Britain to bring Najd, al-Hasa, al-Hijaz and Asir under his rule. Having built his power with British support, Ibn Saud now exploited his relative autonomy to extract favourable agreements over Arabian borders given new strategic significance by the development of air transport routes and the discovery of oil in 1937. During the following decade

21 For an overview of the origins and workings of all the Near Eastern Mandates by a leading imperial historian, see Fieldhouse (2006). For other approaches, see the studies collected in Méouchy and Sluglett (2004) and in Schayegh and Arsan (2015).

22 For the notion of decentralized despotisms as a key feature of “late colonialism” in Africa, see Mamdani (1996).

23 For the connection between indirect rule, the politics of collaborating elites and “excentric” histories of the “non-

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oil wealth transformed Saudi Arabia’s eastern province into an ARAMCO-dominated oil frontier.

Oil rents and Western technical assistance supplied Ibn Saud with the means to consolidate a centralized state and forge a more useful alliance – consecrated by a base agreement on Dahran in 1943 – with the rising US imperium.

The social basis of colonial control in the Arab East combined with the Wilsonian cast of Mandatory institution-building to create a landlord-dominated system of parliamentary rule. In southern Iraq and on the plains around Aleppo and Hama, as well as in ´Akkar, the Shouf, Jabal ´Amil and the Biqa`, the collaborating elites who buttressed colonial control were able to either acquire or consolidate vast landed wealth, the old Ottoman nobility allying with the tribal aristocracy (its great shaykhs now transformed into quasi-feudal landlords) and a commercial elite enriched by a century of dependent economic development to form a class of landed Pashas invested in the imperial connection (Gerber 1987). However, during the decade after the Second World War the stability of an imperial system already weakened by lingering Arabist hostility to the Mandatory partition of the Fertile Crescent was undermined further by an upsurge in class antagonisms in the countryside, and by the post-war Labour government’s failure to effect a developmental shift from “pashas to peasants.”²⁴

The escalating conflict in Palestine drove the last nail into the coffin of “Britain’s moment in the Middle East.” Arab opinion cast Britain and her local collaborators as the chief authors of the Arab defeat in 1948.²⁵ The savagery of the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the Palestinian Nakbah, and the brutality of the Israeli border wars that followed, stoked the fires of a radical Arabism that gelled into a region-wide anti-colonial revolt under the leadership of Gamal Abd al-Nasser. Even before the debacle at Suez in 1956 sounded the death knell of British hegemony in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, the waning of Whitehall’s power had become apparent in its failure to push such client regimes as Hashemite Jordan into the Baghdad Pact in 1955, or to resolve its differences with Saudi Arabia over the Buraimi oasis.²⁶

In the wake of Suez, a combination of US pressure and popular upheaval forced Britain to redeploy to South Arabia and the Persian Gulf, where a “last stand of the Raj” was attempted in order to defend oil interests and sterling balances vital to the solvency of the post war welfare state.²⁷ However, by the late 1960s even this limited engagement was abandoned in the face of armed revolutionary insurrections in Aden and Dhofar. Britain’s last Arabian dependencies were ushered to formal independence in 1971, bringing to an end nearly two centuries of overt imperial intervention in Arab affairs.²⁸

24 For the first Labour government’s attempt to reboot Britain’s colonial empire in the region after the Second World War, see Louis (1984).

25 For the interaction between the politics of “collusion” with Zionism and British strategy, see Bradshaw (2007, 2012), Morris (2002) and Pappé (1992). For Israel’s border wars, see Morris (1993).

26 For a recent assessment of the Suez affair and its consequences, see the studies collected in Smith (2008).

27 The term is taken from Takriti (2013: ch. 6).

28 The whole period of British retreat in Arabia and its continuing neo-colonial presence thereafter has been classically

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1.3 THE DYNAMICS OF, AND STRUGGLE OVER, THE CONTEMPORARY REGIONAL ORDER:

TURNING POINTS

Following the Second World War the European colonial structure of the Mandate system and other forms of direct colonial rule gradually declined, with Arab states (with the notable exception of Palestine) gaining formal independence by 1970 (the Gulf States being the last). As the Arab states, and to some extent the non-Arab neighbouring states, came to form a regional system, a broad struggle to shape regional order persisted as Arab states sought to challenge (or exploit) European and then American intervention in the region (Hinnebusch 2014). At the heart of this ongoing struggle, as well as the scholarly literature about regional order in the Middle East, is the question to what degree the Arab states form their own system, based on shared history, language and identity, and what role the often more powerful non-Arab states of the Middle East are understood to be actors within the system rather than external to it (Noble 1984, 2008). A related issue is to what degree we should view regional political dynamics as defined by various local sub-systems, such as one around the Persian Gulf, consisting of the Arab Gulf States and Iran (Gause 2010). To a large degree these systems are historically constructed and change over time, reflecting shifting balances of material and ideological power.

In any case, the regional system should not be viewed as an autonomous object, but one subject to the power struggles between and interventions from external “great” powers (see the next section on this). In the mid-1980s diplomatic historian L. Carl Brown (1984: 4) observed that “the Middle East is the most penetrated international relations subsystem in today’s world.” By “penetrated”

Brown means, on the one hand, “the Middle East has been more consistently and more thoroughly ensnarled in great power politics than any other part of the non-Western world,” while, on the other hand, no outside power has ever been able to attain hegemonic control or successfully order the region (Brown 1984:3). At the same time, external powers have also consistently intervened to prevent the emergence of a regional power or hegemon from within the region (Lustick 1997).²⁹ While external intervention has continued into the current era, the legacies of past interventions have had a profound impact on the position of the region within global hierarchies of political and economic power (Hinnebusch 2011; see also Dawn 1991). Moreover, many of the political elites who held power within the independent Arab states of the region continued to serve as clients for external powers, with interests more aligned with them rather than the masses of their domestic populations.

While the struggle for regional order in the Middle East has been defined by the intervention of external powers and the geopolitical competition between states, international relations scholars have suggested that dynamics in the regional politics have their own particular characteristics.

While the “classic” neo-realist reading of regional politics, sought to view the patterns of alliances as defined by rational state actors (Walt 1987), most scholars of the region reject the view that politics at the “system level” can be understood without understanding the permeability of the regional system where domestic, regional and global politics are often interconnected (Salloukh

29 F. Gregory Gause III (1992), however, notes that during periods of multipolarity, when many regional powers competed for regional influence, external powers have helped to protect the sovereignty of states from regional rivals and defeat

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and Brynen 2004). On a related note, F. Gregory Gause III (2004:274) concludes that Arab states have “overwhelmingly identified ideological and political threats emanating from abroad to the domestic stability of their ruling regimes as more salient than threats based upon aggregate power, geographic proximity and offensive capabilities.” This system has helped maintain external penetration, as regional elites often rely on external resources and aid to maintain power, which, in turn, continues to foster domestic opposition, regional rivalries and interstate conflicts.

Another particular feature of the system is that Arab societies, along with transnational movements and ideologies, often defined their political interests and understandings of the sources of insecurity in ways that conflicted with those of Arab regimes (Hazbun 2015). Throughout the contemporary era revisionist and revolutionary states, as well as powerful oppositional political movement have continued to view regional security in terms of an Arab or Islamic world threatened primarily by external political, economic and cultural forces (Niva 1999).

This section outlines the major phases and turning points in the history of the struggle to define the regional order. The first post-Second World War phase was defined by the rise of radical Arab nationalism, efforts to rid the regional of its external dependence and Egypt’s effort to order the regional along its own Arab nationalist lines. While conservative Arab states were able to contain the influence of the Arab nationalist and leftist movements by the 1970s and welcome an increased role of the USA in the region, the experience of occupations and the rise of political Islam gave rise to a new wave of (often armed) sub-state and non-state actors that have come to play a major role in the contemporary struggle over the regional order, in which the leverage of the USA to shape the regional system declined following the 2003 Iraq war (Mogdad 2013).

ARAB NATIONALISM AND EGYPT’S EFFORT TO ORDER THE REGION, 1950S-60S

Regional Middle East politics in the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by the efforts of rising Arab nationalist movements to rid the region of their geopolitical subordination to the former colonial powers; as well as the efforts of Arab regimes to build state institutions and political order within their often externally defined sovereign territorial spaces (Hatem 1957). Egypt, the largest Arab state, was the first to consolidate state power under a militarily dominated Arab nationalist regime. Under the charismatic leader of President Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Egypt projected its ideological power regionally at a time that radical Arab nationalism came to dominate political discourse and mobilization across the region. Arab nationalists sought to rid the regional of its dependence on former colonial powers and sought to promote political unity across the Arab world. Nasser’s challenge to the US Cold War Baghdad Pact alliance, nationalization of the Suez Canal and unification with Syria (to form the United Arab Republic) represented the high point of this effort in the late 1950s. In the process, the non-Arab states with closer Western ties – Turkey, Iran and Israel – remained at the margins of the Arab regional system, as Arab states maintained a rejection of Israel’s control over Palestine and Turkey and Iran were more willing to join pro- Western cold war alliances.

While the USA opposed the British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, American efforts to accommodate Egypt ended in the early 1960s as rivalry between Arab republics against the Western-backed conservative monarchies and Israel contained Nasir’s efforts. Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the USA came to more strongly back and arm Israel and its other non-Arab

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ally, Iran. Meanwhile, in the Arab world, the 1967 war had a profound impact on reshaping Arab politics. It marked the decline of Arab nationalism as the most powerful political force, leading to the rise of new radical leftist movements and an autonomous Palestinian nationalist movement committed to armed struggle (Al-Azm 2011). State elites sought to define their national interests in more territorial raison d’état terms, rather than Arab nationalist ones, leading to new contests for regional influence (Ajami 1978).

STATE POWER AND GEOPOLITICAL RIVALRIES, 1970S-80S

Israel’s occupation over Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian territory resulting from the 1967 war led to a new polarization of regional politics along an Arab-Israeli axis that became intersected with the US-Soviet cold war (see, for example, Shlaim 2014). Egypt and Syria moved closer to the USSR who backed their military build-ups in the face of US military support for Israel, while Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil-exporting states organized within the OPEC cartel as they sought to assert natural resource sovereignty by nationalizing foreign own oil assets in their territories. The initially coordinated effort of Egypt and Syria, with the support of the Gulf States, to regain Israeli-occupied territories in the 1973 war marked a shift in the US approach to the region. The USA sought to shift Egypt, now ruled by Anwar Sadat, away from the Soviet orbit.

With the decline of radical Arab nationalist movements and access to economic resources (oil receipts and aid), most Arab regimes came to consolidate their state structures and authority enabling a new phase of fragmentation and geopolitical rivalries between revisionist Middle East states (as well as new dynamics of inequality across the Arab world and closer interdependence between oil rich states and their Western allies) (Kerr and Yassin 1982, Crom 1988).

As Egypt moved closer to the USA and opened US-sponsored negotiations with Israel, other Middle East states saw an opening for a new hegemonic leader. Iran under the Shah sought to gain influence and appeal within the divided Arab region and project power across the Gulf in the decade after Britain granted independence to the smaller Gulf States (Parsi 2006). In the mid- 1970s, Iraq under Saddam Hussein had a similar plan, based on building the country’s national strength while developing closer ties to global middle powers such as France and China (Hussein 1979). Meanwhile, Syria and Israel each sought control over the strategic geography of the Levant (Rabil 2003, Hirst 2010). Israel expanded its control over the West Bank and Gaza while it invaded and later occupied southern Lebanon (Sayigh 1997, Norton 1987). Syrian forces had entered Lebanon following the outbreak of its civil war in the mid-1970s and would stay for another thirty years (Salloukh 2005).

By the end of the 1970s, the regional order was moving toward increasing US influence as Egypt was brought in to negotiate a peace treaty with Israel and the Palestinian nationalist movement was neutralized (Said 1994, Al-Hour 2015). However, this shift was disrupted by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the moving of Soviet troops into Afghanistan. Both events would lead the USA to engage more directly in the region and face unexpected challenges (Freedman 2008).

In 1980 Iraq invaded post-revolutionary Iran and maintained an eight-year war with the backing of the Arab Gulf States and eventually the USA. Iran emerged as the major rival to US Gulf allies, Saudi Arabia in particular, while supporting the rise of what would become the resistance